 Everyone thinks Anarchy is do whatever you want. A massive lesson that I've gotten out of telling the story. Anarchy just means self ownership. The most peaceful ideology in the world. Was that there really is no panacea. Fuck the government. Most of our people were buying into Bitcoin. Coming in on private jets and yachts. That is going to solve everything. This beautiful paradise can be a beacon of freedom for people to migrate to. What happens when a bunch of radical individualists try to start a community? Anarchipulco. Anarchipulco. The biggest anarchist conference. Strip to Mexico. I'm really excited. That is the subject of a new six part HBO docu-series from director Todd Schramke and his wife and co-producer Kim Kylant. The pair spent six years documenting Anarchipulco. An annual conference for anarchists started in Mexico by Jeff Berwick, a political commentator who calls himself the dollar vigilante. All fiat currencies going to zero. All markets just collapsing, closing. I talked with Schramke about how making the film has shaped his view of anarchism and libertarianism and what the story of Anarchipulco can teach us about how to launch successful experiments in alternative living. I also asked him to reflect back on when he found out one of its attendees, a man who called himself John Galton, was murdered. An anarchist has been shot to death. The tragic situation. Rumors spread that other members of the anarchist community may have been involved. There was some sketchy stuff happening behind the scenes. It really was one of the most emotionally complicated few weeks of my life. I mean, my wife and I were that morning, the morning of the murder, going back and forth with John and Lily and the Freemans. We were texting all morning. We were just two weeks away. Less than two weeks or about a week away from our next production trip. And yeah, it was all of a sudden, they all stopped responding. And it was just shortly after that I turned on Facebook and saw that horrific footage of Lily on her live stream. It was just this really, really intense feeling of knowing this was going to change my life in so many ways. And the reason it was so emotionally complicated is because, and it's one of the worst things about being a documentary filmmaker, is that often other people's tragedy can work toward your advantage, which is a really blunt way to put it, but it's true. I mean, I knew this was going to bring this story to a whole new level of complexity and interest, and it proved to be true. And we were the only people out there. We had a small social media presence at the time that was mostly for engaging with the community and people going to the conference so they could know who we were. But because of that, we were the only real outside documentation of the fact that there was this local community that had emerged in Acapulco. So we very quickly started dealing with a lot of press reaching out and trying to get our take on the story all while trying to maintain and follow what was going on within the community and dealing with our friends and family, all begging us not to go to Acapulco again and fearing for our own lives and safety. It's been difficult. It's been challenging. It's fun at times, but at times it's also made me question if documentary film is what I really want to be doing because it's one ethical dilemma after another and in some ways that's what makes it more powerful than a scripted show, but it also comes with a lot of struggle. You saw a lot of media reached out to you after John's death. You portray the framing that the media was running with. It's kind of obvious. An anarchist gets murdered in Mexico doing anarchy. And that was kind of like the headline that you would see, some version of that. Some people featured in the documentary like Jeff Berwick would say, his death really didn't have anything to do with Anarcapulco or anarchy. It was kind of like his. What he was doing outside of that is what brought that in. There's this whole mystery involving a guy who may have been involved with the hit that was put on him. How do you think about that? How do you think about what happened to John and the relationship with Anarcapulco and anarchism more broadly? A massive lesson that I've gotten out of telling the story and experiencing the story firsthand was the importance of embracing ambiguity in life and that there really is no panacea, either technological cryptocurrency or philosophical anarchism that is going to solve everything. And the journey of human existence is just coping with that ambiguity and coming together as humans when we encounter a crisis or encounter tragedy. And I think there is some validity in bringing up the question of, well, isn't this what you get if you don't have rules or laws and you decide you don't want to deal with the police or the government? But it's way more complicated than that. I mean, that's the entire reason we took six hours to tell this entire story. One question that I think that your documentary does raise is what are the problems that anarchism or anarchy can deal with and what are the limits of that? One of the biggest challenges to that is the presence of this guy who went by Paul Propert. He was a military veteran living a pretty transient life, probably had some psychological issues, a lot of aggression, often making threats to everyone around him, just generally creating a very unsettling and unsafe situation. What do you think about that specific question after all this? You know, you're going to have people who just are not really going to play by the rules of polite society, let's say, and if you don't have a police force or, you know, a state police force, what happens next? It's very, very tempting and appropriate at times to reduce all of the conflicts within the community to problems that are inherent to anarchism or libertarianism. But I really wanted to, you know, and it's the reason that I chose so much to focus on the character-driven aspect of the story and the personal drama that all of the subjects were dealing with rather than focus a lot on the ideology and the nuts and bolts of anarchism and the theory is because I think all of the struggles that the community faced are very universal. It's not like our, you know, broader mainstream liberal democracy has figured out how to deal with damaged veterans and how to deal with severe mental health issues and how to deal with the violence that comes with that. It's something that's continuing to grow in all of our cities across the entire country. So I, you know, really hope that people as they're watching this show don't just think of it as, oh, these people are crazy, flawed individuals, but I hope, you know, instead they can look at the story and see how this little microcosm of a society really is just a bigger, you know, or just a representative representation of all of the problems that we face in our larger society because I think ideologies, you know, I think they're fun. I think they're worthy of discussion. I think they have a place in the world. But I think the most interesting thing about them is not so much what they prescribe as solutions for the world, but what you can learn from the people who are drawn from them and how they serve as a sort of barometer for the pressure that's building within the larger society and they can help highlight and bring out some of the issues that we're facing. So you see that in some characters like Paul who was a damaged veteran and you see it and John and Lily who were victims of a nonviolent, very small cannabis charge and so these are issues that don't just exist in anarchy land. These are issues that are global and universal. Yeah, the question of ideology and building an ideologically based community is an interesting one to think about. Is that the way to form a community? This is something that is not just about anarchism. It's something that's been tried in other forms before and gone horribly awry at times. We can all think of the worst cases. One that comes to mind is another docu-series called Wild Wild Country about the Rajneeshi that all built a community around this guru and then ended up perpetrating a huge bio-attack. Does this experience dissuade you from the idea that this is even possible to kind of say, okay, we're all going to intentionally create this community or is it kind of just part of a learning curve and something like anarcho-pucco in the long run really can emerge and thrive? I don't even know how you would exactly measure the success of a community. One could even say that the origin of the United States was an ideologically driven community of people who had a sort of related conception of how a society should be run. I'm not so much interested in the question of whether or not these communities are successful. I'm really just interested in the stories behind them and what a broader audience can learn about themselves by just seeing what these people go through and how they deal with these challenges and hopefully make people think too and introduce them to some new ideologies because, like I said, I think ideologies are fun. I don't think we should just passively look at the world as a fixed thing that we just can't change. I think there's a lot to learn from all sorts of ideologies from across the spectrum and we should be open to them. To me, that really is the conception of freedom after all of this that I hold on to most, which is this idea of having a stateless mind, being able to engage in conversations about ideas that are new and different and take them seriously, which is what I tried to do in the show is not simply write off what these people were saying based on my own preconceptions or what I expected the audience to preconceive and categorize them as something simple and defamatory like Cryptobro but really look into what were the hopes and dreams of all of these people. Do you feel like anyone that is or was a part of that community is on their way to achieving that or has achieved that? There's a lot of really heartbreaking tragedy in this series but is there anyone who's actually really happy and satisfied with their decision and you feel like it's found a balance between living their lives peacefully and the way they want to idealistically? That really is one of the most fascinating things about telling the story and making this series was just seeing all of these subjects, many of whom previously were viewing each other as rivals and enemies really go on the same journey and in the end, even though not all of peace wasn't made with everyone but I think the universal conclusion that they all brought out of their experience was exactly that. They realized that the world is much more complex and ambiguous than any abstract school of thought can reduce it to so it really was a beautiful conclusion to see out of such a really troubling and dramatic experience. That is a very nice conclusion and even Jeff Berwick tears up at the end of there which is kind of touching but Jeff Berwick, the ringleader of all this the dollar vigilante, at one point he says something like, they're trying to make it out like I'm a cult leader. I don't think it's that nefarious but there is a certain salesmanship to all of this. It's not just a community but it is a money-making conference and that seemed to create some conflicting incentives along the way. Berwick is very charismatic and entertaining figure but I'd say his portrayal is definitely less than flattering. What are your thoughts on Berwick's intentions and motives, the guy at the center of all this as somebody who spent so much time with him? Yeah, it's interesting the perception people have had of Berwick. There have been people out there digging up all of his videos and going through and pulling out things that he said that they can't believe we didn't even include in the series because they're so inflammatory. But Jeff is a really, really complicated person and he himself has, and maybe it's just an excuse he uses to, you know, explain why he says so many things that are really inflammatory and often contradictory too but he has said that he doesn't believe anything he hears, which to me means that, you know, most of the time he's really, when he's doing his walk-in talks or appearing on one of his shows, he's kind of just saying whatever comes to his mind and whatever he feels in that moment, which is obviously problematic in a bunch of different ways but it can help you understand who he is as a person, which is just someone who is to the very most extreme, radically skeptical of everything, every single detail of existence, which in turn has created, I think, a lot of the drama in his life. Yeah, and it all kind of raised the question for me, what if it had been someone other than Berwick at the center of all this and maybe that's just, maybe it had to be Jeff Berwick because those attributes are what are necessary to get this thing kickstarted or whatever but, you know, a lot of the people in the documentary talk about the ways in which, you know, the sense of community, they're trying to build a community and that means stepping up to help each other when somebody stumbles. A lot of people in the documentary seem to feel that the community was falling short of that. What was your sense of how the tension between the kind of individualist aspects of libertarianism and the need for a communitarian sentiment played out in Acapulco? That really was, when I was pitching this show, I often was hooking people in by saying, well, what happens when you have a community of radical individualists come together? What does that even mean or look like? And part of my journey in thinking about all of this, though, and maybe it's a bit lofty and arrogant, but I think one of the biggest problems we have in our society, especially in political discourse, is that we hold on to this false dichotomy of individualist versus collectivist, which is, if you just think about it for a few minutes, it's completely absurd. You know, in order to have a healthy collective, you need to have healthy individuals and the other way around the same thing. And I think that is something that this community really started to experience. I think they were holding on to a lot of the ideals of the early libertarian movement, which we discuss is rooted in Rand's philosophy and this idea that rational self-interest and simply engaging in market transactions can solve everything, which I think this community found was just not the case. You need more than that. The reality is market transactions can do a lot, but just like Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, that is just one social tool that we have and we need to look beyond that. I also heard a few people saying, you know, this is supposed to be anarchy. Why do I have to follow these rules? Or why can't I set up a booth right in the middle of this convention floor or something? And that struck me as a very strange understanding of what this was all about. Maybe that was rooted in that sort of immature version of individualism where you're like, it just means I don't have to follow any rules whatsoever. Something I've generally observed in a lot of these counter-cultural communities is that it often starts with a core group of people who are kind of just nerds that are into arguing and debating and this is the latest thing that they're into and they're excited to just meet people who are into it. And in doing that, they open up their community and their social circles to anyone who wants to come in and participate. And in doing that, you get more and more people who are often troubled and their people are not so much interested in the intellect or the debate, they're just looking for friends and people to be around. So they don't really have the deeper understanding of the arguments of how individualism also means it's not just self-interest, it's rational self-interest. It's thinking long-term and thinking about how maintaining social relationships and maintaining a community and deferring gratification is also a form of self-interest. And I think a lot of people in movements like this don't really get that far and they show up and they're bringing a lot of their baggage from their past life and processing that in real time with these people that they barely know. And in doing that, I think sometimes they may even just use the very, very vague general principles of the ideology they've adopted as an excuse for their sometimes anti-social behavior. One of the really powerful things about your documentary is you do show some of the people within it who are kind of experiencing this evolution in their thinking and maybe that is part of the process here, is like you can't just, you know, all these things might make sense on paper but you kind of got to go live it and learn from experience. If anarchy is feasible as a stable system and I'm not by any means certain that it is, what do you think what happened in Acapulco can tell us about either the promise or the pitfalls or both of trying it under those kinds of conditions where you're kind of rebuilding in like the shell of collapsing institutions around you? I would say the community in Acapulco never really even had a system which kind of makes sense though because anarchism is not really a system, it's an absence of a system which is what we all accept as inherent in our society which is that there is a necessity for an initiation of force against people either through laws or taxation. So these people never really entirely escaped it. I think they used it as a way to evade some of those forces in the world but they were still living in a major city in Mexico with over a million people and they were interacting with the police in some ways more than they were back in the US especially for the Freemans who were living in a pretty comfortable, secured, suburban Georgian lifestyle back in the US. So in Acapulco you encounter the police a lot, they're everywhere, there's more police. That was actually what surprised me more than anything the first time I went to Acapulco was just seeing how much of a police presence there is and not just what we think as cops in the US but militarized police who are driving around in trucks with mounted machine guns. It came to me as a bit of a surprise immediately to see that this was the ideal anarchist state. So I don't know if I really learned much in the capacity of the feasibility of something like this. I think, like I said before, my interest was more so in the personal journeys of the people who were drawn there. What was the biggest change that you felt like you underwent throughout this journey? The biggest thing I took away was realizing that regardless of what ideologies we hold, what belief systems we ascribe to, no matter what, we have to be looking inward as people and figuring out how to deal with our own mental health, dealing with our own relationships before we can have an improved society. And I think maybe there is in some version of humanity a world in which we all can interact voluntarily and there is no initiation of force but the only way we'll ever get there is if we start dealing with our relationships and become more peaceful, I think first and foremost internally and psychologically and develop our skills and our abilities to negotiate and interact voluntarily and take care of each other voluntarily and step up when people are in need and focus on what's around us and not so much think of the global issues which are important. We need to understand living in a complex globalized economy, what's going on around the world but I think more than anything people need to be out there looking at their own communities and their own families and seeing what they can improve in that capacity because that is truly what we have the most power and control over and I think that is both on an individual level a very, very immediate reward that we can get. If you just improve your relationships with either your partner or spouse or your children, you can find the benefits of voluntarism or anarchism within your own life by doing that and I think that will then reflect eventually on the collective benefits across the entire society. Todd, you and Kim have created a just remarkable series here that I highly recommend to anybody even slightly interested in these ideas whether you love them or hate them I think there's going to be something there to learn and I want to thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me today. Yeah, thank you so much for having me.